Booking fees
£1.50 booking fee per online/phone transaction.
No fee when tickets are booked in person.
Booking fees are per transaction and not per ticket. If your booking contains several events the highest booking fee will apply. The booking fee may be reduced on certain events. Members do not pay booking fees.
Dance Umbrella 2025 Season
The international festival brings two UK premieres in dance, a screening of short films and an a cappella performance based on Gesualdo scriptures.
Film Programme
Film Programme
bulabulay mun?
This film originate from the wounds of war and colonial history, looking beyond collective or national memory — it digs into the deep cracks that still echo inside the body.
Taiwan 2022 dir Tjimur Dance Theatre, 12 min, in Paiwan language with English subtitles
Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, There is a Garden. I Will Meet You There
Drifting between worlds seen and unseen, this quietly powerful film by Yin-Ju Chen weaves mysticism, collective memory, and the echoes of trauma into a meditation on the fragile bond between the self and the cosmos.
Taiwan 2023 dir Yin-Ju Chen, 16 min, in Mandarin with English subtitles
Si So Mi
A stop-motion animation by Taiwanese artist-filmmaker Zhang Xu Zhan, which transforms traditional funeral imagery into a surreal, celebratory ritual.
Taiwan 2017 dir Zhang Xu Zhan, 5 min, no dialogue
The Silence of Sirens
A meditation on cinema as a dance of light, emotion, illusion, and an embryology of images. Throughout the process, the artist collaborated with ChatGPT to generate poetic text fragments, which became both reference and rhythm within the film.
Taiwan 2023 dir Tzu-An Wu, 6 min, no dialogue
Spinning
This visual diary draws on daily footage captured across the seasons to reveal both the shifting landscape around the filmmaker and her own inner transformation.
Japan 2023 dir Ai Ozaki, 11 min, in Japanese with English subtitles
S/Z Rye Green Berry
Dancing across boundaries in both content and form, this short explores cross-dressing in various traditional Asian operas while using the materiality of film to demonstrate how cinema reshapes memory and perception over time.
Taiwan 2025 dir Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, 20 min, in multiple languages with English subtitles
Biographies
HSIEH I-Hsuan (She/Her)
HSIEH I-Hsuan is a film curator, writer and researcher based in Amsterdam and Taipei with a background in anthropology.
She programmes for Women Make Waves Film Festival Taiwan and the Singapore Film Festival, and also works independently with a focus on East and Southeast Asian cinema.
She offers film festival strategy consultancy for short films and documentaries, helping filmmakers navigate the international circuit. She is editor-in-chief of Taiwan Documentary E-Paper and a member of the Taiwan Film Critics Society.
Her writing centres on non-fiction and artists’ films, highlighting underrepresented voices in Asian cinema and broader film discourse.
Emily Shin-Jie Lee (She/Her)
Emily Shin-Jie Lee is a cultural practitioner based in Amsterdam, currently head of research at Framer Framed. Her work focuses on residencies, fellowships and cross-institutional collaborations shaped through discursive formats.
She studied anthropology at National Taiwan University and holds a research master’s in art studies from the University of Amsterdam. Since 2022, she has been pursuing a PhD at ASCA, exploring art residencies in relation to ecological, feminist and decolonial concerns.
Emily is a founding member of Lightbox in Taipei, and co-founder of Limestone Books in Maastricht and Hide & Seek Audiovisual Art, a collective for cultural mediation and alternative pedagogy.
Cinema 3
Location
Barbican Cinema 1 is located within the main Barbican building on Level -2. Head to Level G and walk towards the Lakeside Terrace where you’ll find stairs and lifts to take you down to the venue floor.
Address
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS
Public transport
The Barbican is widely accessible by bus, tube, train and by foot or bicycle. Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance.
